An increase in creepy crimes?

I've come to the conclusion, I think, that something really creepy is going on in society.  Truly creepy.

Now, let me note that I started this post weeks and weeks ago.  So long ago that I can't remember, actually, when I started it.  Sometime in 2016, but I'm not sure when.  I revived it when the creepy story about Brock Turner, the Stamford University student and swimmer who was hardly sentenced for his horrific assault on a young woman following a party came up.  But then I let it sit again and getting back to posting it was inspired by that.  Frankly, that event takes this to such a horrific level that it almost stands to wipe out my point, so I'll start where I was going to start in just a moment.  I most recently returned to this story when a 19 year old man was sentenced in the last couple of days for sexual assault, that crime involving having impregnated a 12 year old girl, when he was 17, in a closet at a home in which he was staying with that girls family. That crime came to light, apparently, through the girl having reported to a physician pregnant and then revealing the story.

That guy got something like two to six years (I forget the exact sentence, but it was something like that).  The prosecutor wanted more.  His defense attorney wanted less on the basis that he was the sole support for his mother and sister.

Hm.

Hardly a day goes by anymore where I don't read of some hideous assault by a man upon a female victim, and frankly usually they're are young women, i.e., teenage girls.  This would be bad enough if I was reading of these events every few months, worse if it was every month, but frankly now its darned near every day.  Yes, almost every day here there's an assault by a male upon some teenage girl, or even girls.  Indeed just this past week there was a story that broke here of a family that had groomed a family friend's daughter for sadomasochistic acts.  Creeps.

Now, that should make it clear, I suppose, that we're sometimes speaking of crimes that may have an element, or not, of consent by the victims.  The  17 year old impregnating a 12 year old apparently did, as they exchanged texts about sex before they engaged in the activity. Looking for trends or commonalities in the crimes, I'd note that one that shows up in more than a few is enticement by drugs or alcohol. But that's far from the rule.  Quite a few are just outright assaults.   The victims report them nearly immediately, quite often, thank goodness, and they perpetrators are arrested quickly, and usually tried and convicted.

Beyond the drugs and alcohol there seems to be little in common save for that the perpetrators are often vagabonds or nearly so, although not always.  Almost all of them are on the bottom end of the economic scale, to say the least, although not all are.  A not un-appreicable number, no matter what a person believes stating this means, are Mexicans. I'm not claiming that all Mexican immigrants are perpetrators of this sort of stuff by any means, but if a person is honest you cannot help but note that the perpetrators who are Mexican who show up in this category here exceed their percentage of the population.  If a person reads between the lines, its usually clear that those who fit that category are actually from Mexico, FWIW, not people of Mexican heritage from the US (and no, I'm not claiming by a long shot that all Mexican men are perpetrators waiting to happen).  Not that this is uniform, indeed several years ago one of the fellows who was enticing young teenagers in this fashion was a local lawyer.

Added to this, I'd note, that hardly a week goes buy in which somebody isn't busted for the illegal downloading of icky photos in the above referenced category, and they aren't usually immigrant Mexicans, I'd note. Again, I'd not be surprised if this happened occasionally, but its freaking constant.

So what's going on?

Something is.

I suppose maybe this sort of stuff (well. . . not the downloading obviously, as you couldn't download anything forty years ago) may have always happened, but it just didn't get reported, or the victims didn't report it.   Maybe, but I doubt it.  There's just way too much of this for this all have to been kept quiet years ago, and frankly the perpetrators are largely in the class that doesn't get much legal slack.  So I think there really is more.

But why?

I've noted before on this site that statistically the amount of violence, including violent crime, is way down in the US.  And killings are certainly quite uncommon here. So are examples of violent physical assault, or mayhem, or things like that. But these sort of creepy crimes have to be way, way up.  I just can't ever recall a prior era in which they showed up in the press nearly daily.  Indeed, in a lot of prior eras here, when we were fairly acclimated to fights going awry, we would have been horrified by something of this nature.

And I think that has to do something with the decline in morals, i.e., the emphasis on personal virtue in regards to your own conduct in this area.

Maybe that's a leap, but I do.

I think our culture, at this point, is so awash in images and projections suggesting that all women are available to any man, that a certain class of men now believes that.  And beyond that, the line of what is acceptable or not, on a societal basis, is now so faded that unless a person has picked up a line from outside of the cultural mainstream its extremely difficult to tell where that line may be.

A look at any of the popular television shows (yes, I know, television is stupid, but maybe its a type of mirror  also) is illuminating in these regards.  A show like, for example, Friends shows the young engaged in constant libertine activity.  The Big Bang Theory is the same way.  The "reality" show Vanderpump Rules depicts a group of people whose morals are so far in the sewer it would take a rotorooter to find them (did we really need to import these people from the UK, seriously?).  A recent pop song celebrates Blurred Lines. Singer who originally made acquired their fame as cute child stars appear naked darned near anywhere they can.  Any sexual act or inclination is celebrated as being normal, irrespective of the evidence.  The examples are nearly endless.

I do not mean to excuse any of this conduct, as its reprehensible.  But seriously, if you take a society and simply endlessly bathe it in sexual content, and sexual content, and then argue in its courts and solons that any act at all is normal, is going to produce this result.  And it has.

So, the biggest criminal of all turns out, in some ways, to be our current culture itself.  And we end up all being the victims.